Ensuring Safety in the Textile Industry

PerkinElmer Ltd is helping the textile industry regulate the use of prohibited allergenic and toxic substances in garments with its high performance Optima™ ICP-OES systems. Swedish analytical company, Swerea IVF, is using the versatile and precision-engineered Optima ICPOES 2100 to analyse exposure to residual metals from leading brands of jeans. The speed and accuracy of the Optima system is proving invaluable in the detection of low levels of heavy metals, including mercury and lead, which can have poor sample stability.

The analysis is performed as part of the OEKO-TEX certification for the safety of textiles. Swerea IVF employs an analytical model to mimic how metals are partly dissolved and transferred to the skin while wearing textile garments, such as jeans.

Once the metals have been extracted from the material using an artificial sweat solution, the samples are analysed immediately using the Optima ICP-OES to reduce the risk of decomposition. The multi-component spectral fitting (MSF) algorithm in the ICP software, combined with excellent wavelength stability, ensures optimum detection results are achieved.

Anders Blom, Swerea IVF, Sweden, commented: “We are very pleased with the Optima system from PerkinElmer. It is so simple and easy to run the analysis on undiluted samples and the detection limits are excellent. We compared the Optima with several other ICP-OES instruments, but were impressed by the sequential scanning on PerkinElmer’s Optima 2100 system and consider it to be a high-resolution ICP-OES instrument.”

“We are delighted to be working with Swerea IVF to help ensure the safety of consumers of popular brands of clothing,” said Dusty Tenney, President, Analytical Sciences and Laboratory Services, PerkinElmer, Inc. “Consumer product safety is a key objective for PerkinElmer.

We are committed to discovering new and more effective ways of using our detection capabilities to keep consumers safe from toxins and contaminants in everyday products.”